After a few minutes of rest and a quick drink of water, we continued to work our way down the oversized staircase, our ears constantly alert for sounds of pursuit. With his longer legs and lighter frame, Adam found the going easier. The aches and pains in my protesting legs eventually obliged me to shelve my pride and allow him to help. As I eased myself over the lip of each step, he took my elbow and supported as much of my weight as he could, taking the pressure from my knees.

“Thank you,” I said, feeling like an old woman. He merely smiled, eyes averted with the embarrassment the young feel around the elderly and infirm. It was hard to remember that, only three days ago, we’d been enthusiastically fucking each other’s brains out. Now, he saw me as something quite different. The poet he’d worshipped had changed like clay in his hands, shifting to reveal the face of a medusa—a middle-aged war criminal in a pair of dead girl’s shoes.

“Is it my imagination,” he asked after a few minutes, “or is it getting lighter in here?”

I had been moving on autopilot, preoccupied with self-pity. But now Adam mentioned it, I realised the air around us had grown almost imperceptibly brighter. The quartz walls and ribbed ceiling were giving off a faint and milky luminescence—one that increased in intensity as we continued our descent, until, after another twenty steps, our torches had become superfluous. We turned them off and stood blinking at each other in the pale light.

Adam put a palm against the smooth wall. “It’s beautiful,” he said.

I couldn’t help but agree. “It reminds me of a full moon.”

“A full moon?” Adam looked puzzled, and I felt an unexpected pang of sorrow at the gulf between us, and the thought of all the wonders he had missed in his half-lived life.

“When I was a kid back on Earth,” I said quietly, “we had a little hillside farm with a few dozen goats. The way these walls shine reminds me of the way the moonlight lit up the fields at night.”

“Ah.” Comprehension dawned. “You mean sunlight reflected from the planet’s satellite?”